Sufferance, p.1
Sufferance, page 1
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Title: Sufferance / Charles Palliser.
Names: Palliser, Charles, 1947- author.
Series: Guernica world editions (Series) ; 76.
Description: Series statement: Guernica world editions ; 76
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0230550207 | ISBN 9781771838856
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Contents
Cover
Title page
Copyright
Sufferance
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Landmarks
Half Title Page
Half Title Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Dedication
Acknowledgments
For Helen
The girl was not even in my daughter’s class—my younger daughter, I mean. The two were the same age—thirteen—and they attended the same school, but they were in different ability groups and had no reason ever to have met each other. Things could so easily have been different, and if it had not been for a trivial remark, she might never have entered our lives. We didn’t know her parents. In fact, neither my wife nor I had any idea who her family were for some time after becoming involved with her. The War changed everything. Following the sudden and unexpected invasion, everything closed for two weeks: schools, offices, banks, and many of the shops. During that time all four of us stayed at home listening to the wireless—except when my wife and I took it in turns to venture out, very cautiously, to buy food every few days. The city was a long way from the fighting, and we weren’t bombed during the attempt to resist the invasion. But we knew that thousands of our soldiers had been killed or injured or captured and hundreds of civilians had died in the air-raids. It was one of the few times I thanked providence I had no son.
By the second week the streets were dangerous because of the influx into the city of refugees and deserters.
* * *
At the beginning of the third week after the then-capital fell and the government fled abroad, the new regime took control and negotiated an armistice and then a surrender. Things started to return to normal. And yet ‘normal’ is not the right word since everything was going to be completely different from now on. I returned to work and, as a civil servant employed by the city administration, I saw very clearly how power at the top of the chain of command had passed into new hands even before the occupying forces arrived.
It seemed as if the War was over. That’s what we thought. We believed that if our nation had been defeated so quickly and easily, the other countries opposing our Enemy had no chance either. Within a few months, virtually the whole continent would be in the hands of the invaders.
The men who now took control of our city were not people we would have chosen in a free election. (Not that we had had any free elections for some time.) They were the ones who claimed they could defend the interests of the people while working with the occupying forces. The reason they were at first trusted was that they had no record of adherence to an ideology that was now discredited. In effect, it was a kind of malign filtering process: any politician or administrator with decency and scruples fell through the meshes of the net leaving only the self-interested scoundrels. Many of our best people went into hiding for fear of arrest.
When the occupation authority imposed by the Enemy arrived in the third week, these men were in place to greet it. One of the first orders the new authority gave was to require our police to evict from the city anyone who had no right to remain—those whose identity-cards did not show an address inside the urban limits. Within a few days the streets and public spaces had been cleared of the thousands of men, women and children who had been sleeping in the open and begging for food from passers-by. Where they went and what became of them, nobody knew. And nobody asked.
Crucially for what happened to my family, the country was cut into two zones by the occupying power: the Western Zone and the Eastern Zone in which our city lay.
* * *
Now that it was safe, the children started going back to school. And on her first day there my younger daughter came home and while we were having supper, started telling us about a girl she knew very slightly who was in a different class. The girl was living alone in her family’s house in a state of high anxiety. Her parents and younger brother had been in the capital when the Enemy attacked. They had been trapped there because all trains had been requisitioned for the movement of troops and the roads were closed to all but military traffic. And when the armistice had brought an end to the fighting and divided the nation in two, the capital—the former capital as I should now call it—was in the Western Zone. They were therefore unable to return or even to communicate since the telephone lines had been cut and the postal service suspended.
Our daughter told us that the poor child was also worried about her elder brother. He had gone into the army when the reserves were called up, and his regiment had been sent to the front as soon as the invasion began. That was all anyone knew at the time.
My wife said: Surely the child isn’t all alone? At her age?
My daughter said: There is a servant at the house who is looking after her—the one who brings her to school—but she told me they don’t get on.
I asked: She has no other relatives?
My daughter shrugged and said: Apparently not.
She told us the girl was very pretty and always very beautifully dressed. Until her parents had gone away, she was brought to school in a big car driven by a uniformed chauffeur. Now she was escorted coming and going by the servant.
She was not liked by most of the other pupils because apart from anything else, she was a show-off and so even the other rich girls shunned her.
I said: What about the girls from her own community?
My daughter said: She’s the only one of those at my school who is from a wealthy background since all the others with rich parents go to private schools. Her own kind don’t seem to like her either.
I wondered why the girl was the exception. Why hadn’t her parents sent her to a fee-paying school?
Over the next few days my daughter befriended the girl because she had a good heart and saw that despite her boasting, the other child was very lonely. My daughter, too, had not found it easy to make friends—partly I think because of her sensitivity and partly because our social circumstances were modest and she was therefore excluded from the circle of better-off girls whose friendship was most sought after.
* * *
Our daughter talked to us about the girl and told us she had still heard nothing from her parents or her brother. I really don’t remember how the idea was first mooted that she should come and have dinner with us. I think my wife suggested it. She was sorry for the girl, and I remember her saying to me afterwards: If our younger daughter was left alone in this situation, wouldn’t we hope that some kind family would take an interest in her?
So it was agreed that the next day our daughter should invite her to have her evening meal with us on the day following that.
I suppose we realised from the address of the girl’s house, and the fact there was a servant living there and the reference to a chauffeur, that her family were well-off; but I have to make it clear we did not take an interest in her because we expected to be rewarded or anything like that.
The girl came to dinner two days later when my daughter accompanied her back from school. She was charming. I thought she seemed much older than our own daughter because she appeared to be so poised—quite the young lady. I remember that as soon as she entered the living-room she crossed to the window and said: Oh, you have such a lovely view. How I envy you that.
It’s true that there was a spacious prospect over private gardens and a public park and then in the distance you could just see the cathedral. However, the truth must have been that our apartment seemed small and shabby in comp arison with what she was used to and so that remark was well-chosen. We were close enough to the railway line to the East for trains to be audible at night. And on this first visit—and now, of course, I see how uncanny it was—she squeezed herself into the corner and said: Look, you can just see the canal from here. How delightful it looks.
It was not at all delightful. It was just a bleak industrial waterway. But now as I hear her bright young voice uttering the word ‘canal’, I find myself shivering.
Then she turned and exclaimed: Oh, you have a piano!
She said she was learning the instrument, and so my wife invited her to try ours. The girl insisted our younger daughter play first and then she performed. I am not a pianist myself, but it was clear to me that she was better than either of our daughters in the sense that she executed pieces which were much more technically demanding. It seemed to me—and my wife later confirmed it—that she had been well taught but was not musically gifted, whereas both my daughters had less skill but more musicality. Especially the younger who played beautifully.
I could see that my younger daughter was put out by the girl’s superior accomplishment.
Despite the girl’s poise there was one moment of awkwardness. She didn’t touch the main component of the meal my wife had prepared, and that was in spite of the fact that we had taken account of the dietary restrictions of her community. I suppose she just didn’t like it—I forget what it was—or else mistook it for something she was not supposed to eat.
She struck me as a bright, bubbly child. She was pretty and had big green-grey eyes. She smiled and laughed constantly, which surprised me, and it appeared to me that she was completely unconcerned about the fact that the rest of her family were elsewhere and possibly in grave danger. Certainly, you’d think the fate of her brother would be worrying her since he must be a prisoner-of-war if he was not injured or dead.
Our domestic prepared the evening meal on the days she came to us but then left before we sat down to it. On this occasion she had stayed on to help serve it, and the girl couldn’t disguise her surprise that we had only one servant and that she didn’t live in the apartment but just came during the day.
She talked—in fact, she chattered away—about her life. She appeared to be very unguarded and gossiped freely and openly about her family and her interests. I could see that both my children were dazzled by what she was describing. And what made it more striking was that she did not seem to be boasting. The life she was telling us about was something she took for granted, and it didn’t occur to her that my daughters might envy her. At least, that’s how it struck me at that point.
She told us about her extensive circle of friends who were the sons and daughters of other wealthy members of her community—their fathers being bankers, lawyers, or doctors. All of them went to school elsewhere—mostly in or around the former capital—and were away now. But when they were back during the holidays they shared a life of visits, outings, music-making, and parties. In the summer there was tennis and swimming at the country-houses they owned or picnics in the woods with chauffeurs in attendance carrying large hampers. Her own family had a villa in the country beside a lake.
I thought how lucky her father was to be able to give his daughter so many advantages. On my salary it was all I could do to treat my children to two weeks by the sea in the summer and a week-end in the capital every autumn to see our relatives.
I kept waiting for her to say that when things had settled down, she would invite at least my younger daughter, if not the elder, to take part in the gatherings, but she did not.
I asked her about her circumstances at that moment, and she confirmed her family’s house was unoccupied except for one servant. She wrinkled her nose when she mentioned her and without any prompting told us how much she disliked the woman. She had always been bad-tempered and disobliging, but now that she was in effect in loco parentis, she was seizing the opportunity to punish and humiliate the girl to revenge herself against the family that employed her. She catalogued a series of mean-minded decisions the woman had taken. And she believed the woman was dishonest.
At one point my elder daughter was rather tactless and it was the only moment when the girl’s poise faltered. When she mentioned that her parents had moved to this country when she was six, my daughter complimented her on her perfect command of our language and then asked her if she was equally fluent in that of the people who live in the Old City. The girl flushed as if she had been slapped and said stiffly: I don’t speak a word of it. It’s only for ignorant people.
My daughter seemed puzzled and said: But aren’t many of those girls at your school?
She flared up and said: I have nothing to do with them. They wear the most dreadfully shabby clothes and they don’t speak the language of this country properly.
I might mention here that afterwards my younger daughter told my wife and me something interesting about the child: the girls of her own sort—all of whom were poor since the wealthy ones were at private schools—shunned her as much as she did them, and my daughter thought it was because they resented the way she flourished her wealth by wearing fine clothes and carrying her things in an expensive leather bag from Paris.
To change the subject, I now asked if she had any relatives in the city that she could move in with until her parents returned—aunts and uncles and grandparents—and she explained that because her family had moved to the city only recently, she had no other relatives nearby.
I asked where her parents were staying in the former capital, and she mentioned a hotel whose name I recognised as one of the grandest. It was at that stage, of course, impossible to phone it because the hostilities had severed the phone-lines.
One odd thing. When it came time for her to go, she didn’t want to leave. She made some remark about staying the night. Of course there could be no question of that, and my younger daughter and I walked home with her. She lived in the most fashionable part of the city—an area of quiet tree-lined avenues with large detached mansions, many of which were protected by iron gates leading to paved courtyards. She stopped at one of them, and it was only when I saw how big the house was that I realised how very wealthy her family must be. It was a spacious villa on three floors and, as I learned later, it had a large garden behind it with a coach-house at the end.
I asked her what her father did for a living, and it was only now that I found out he owned—or perhaps part-owned because I never got to the bottom of that question—the big department store that was on the corner of the square where the cathedral then stood. The shop sold clothes and household articles, and my wife must have bought things there many times. The name of the store and the girl’s family name were not the same, and so we had had no reason to connect them until she revealed the link.
The servant opened the door, and she didn’t look like a pleasant woman. She was about fifty, with a hard, thin face that seemed to be fixed in a permanent scowl. She glared at my daughter and me and didn’t soften her gaze when she turned to the girl. She just said: Hurry along now, miss. It’s later than you promised.
The girl behaved very sweetly when we said goodbye. She kissed my younger daughter and shook hands with me and said: You’ve been so kind. Really, so very kind.
It was such a strangely grown-up remark. She must have heard her mother say it. Or even perhaps picked it up at the cinema from some romantic foreign film. Then she suddenly stood on tiptoe and kissed my cheek and whispered: I wish you were my daddy. She turned and hurried into the house as if she dared not stay a moment longer or she might break down in tears.
That was the remark which triggered everything that followed. In that moment I felt for her as if she were my own child, and the idea came to me that was to have such far-reaching consequences.
As my younger daughter and I walked home, I discovered to my surprise that she had decided she did not like the girl after all—even though it was she who had first taken an interest in her. She called her false and contriving and snobbish. She had exuded superiority: our piano-playing was inferior; our apartment was cramped; and our best food wasn’t good enough for her. I said she had behaved impeccably given that she was in a milieu she could not have been used to. Of course there were things about the way we lived—and even the way we spoke—that must have surprised and perhaps offended her, but she had taken care not to let it appear. Would my daughter have preferred her to have spat out the food? Surely it was better just to have left it uneaten. She was not persuaded. She accused her of showing off with all her talk of her friends and their affluent lives, but later I wondered if the fact that she wasn’t—apparently—boasting when she talked of those things but just taking them for granted as perfectly normal, might have been what had irritated my daughter, who was generally very sweet-natured.
